104 YEARS OLD

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6850, 4 March 1929, Page 3

104 YEARS OLD

MRS. PRANCES WEBB. BORN IN REIGN OF GEORGE IV. On Saturday, Mrs. Frances Webb, ■widow of the late Mr. William Webb, of New Plymouth, celebrated her 104th birthday at the rcsideneo of her daughter. Mrs. H. G. Foote, of Haggitt street, Fcilding, with whom sho resides.

Born at Silverwcll, near Truro, in Cornwall in 1825. in the reign of George IV, Mrs. Webb has lived through the reign of five sovereigns, ami was 12 years of age when Queen Victoria was crowned.

Mrs. Webb, whose maiden name was Harris, lived in Cornwall until her marriage in 1851 to Mr. William Webb at Linkinhorne, Laskeard, Cornwall. With her husband Mrs. Webb sailed from Liverpool just before Christmas 1857, for Australia in the American sailer Tornado, which took six months to accomplish the voyage. Arriving in Melbourne, they later went to the gold diggings at Bendigo where Mr. Webb introduced the first gold quartz-crush-ing plant that went to Australia. Mrs. Webb still wears a brooch made of some of the gold secured there by her husband in those early days. After some vears at Bendigo, Mrs. Webb and her husband went to the diggings in Otago and lived subsequently at Dunedin, Hokitika and New Plymouth. In conversation on her birthday with a pressman. Mrs. Foote, said that her mother remembered that Saturday was her birth'day and memories of the congratulatory messages received on reaching her centenary and each year following, were fresh in her mind. On Knturdav messages wctc received from far and wide and it was wonderful to note how much Mrs. Webb, who still retains her faculties, was able to appreciate the good wishes. Mrs. Webb was not able to sit up on Saturday, owing to the cold wind an-d she is naturally not as strong as she was 12 months ago, when she received visitors while sitting in an easy chair on the verandah in the sun.

Mrs. Foote attributes her mother’s remarkab’o condition to the fact that she was always of a calm and collected disposition and never permitted the hardships she endured in the pioneering days to worry or distress her.